Let me die alone but please film it is the Marc Badia (Barcelona, 1984) and Jan Monclús (Lleida, 1987) new project which they present together at the Arranz Bravo Foundation within the Gallery Weekend program. Barcelona 2017.

Let me die alone but please film explores the similarities between the success-failure binomial and the concept of absurd or “do in spite of”. A combination that allows us to understand and approach certain dysfunctional interests shared by the two artists such as error, failure, joke or absurd challenge.

I did not know I was collecting’ is the first solo exhibition of an institutional nature of Francesc Ruiz Abad, winner of visual arts Arranz-Bravo 2015. The curator of the exhibition, Anna Dot, proposes an exhibition route that it consists of a random sequence of paintings, drawings, books, maps, boxes, travel documents or audiovisual linked to the artistic and personal journey of the artist. The exhibition wants to highlight the “procedural” nature of the work of an artist who has done most of the pictorial experiences roaming (Europe. Asia and America). His work is a “painting crossing.” as defined in the catalog of the exhibition, Albert Mercadé artistic director of the FAB; an open painting to the own strategies of conceptual art -the travel, exploration, and research- textual work, without sacrificing the aesthetic principles of contemporary painting: irony, plastic strangeness and intensity.

Francesc Ruiz is a leading exponent of the new Barcelona pictorial scene; a generation born during the nineties that has the ambition to return the painting to the centrality of contemporary art. His pictorial referents are mainly in contemporary European painting: Sigmar Polke, Oliver Kossack, Fiona Rae, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski or Leipzig School (Tilo Baumgärtel, Jonathan Meese … etc), this is the last city where Frances Ruiz has live. An ironic, psychedelic and vital work, which links to the work of resistant paints our own context, as Pere Llobera or Nilausen Rasmus.

If there is an autonomous discipline that has survived post modern iconoclasm, it is drawing. Along the way, other historic arts have become displaced, but drawing, disegno, continues to be a valid, rigorous practice. This affirmation is also applicable to the art of Eduard Arranz-Bravo. The artist hasgone through different artisticstages and attitudes: from the poetic art of the early-sixties to the more experimental and engaged work of the seventies and his present symbolic-monumental period. And, throughout all these stages, drawing has remained his most beloved and loyal resource. Drawing continues to be “art’s springboard”, the private laboratory of utopian experimentation that is essential to achieving, ultimately, the great artistic metaphor.

The exhibition Arranz-Bravo. Drawing in Actionreviews the uses, techniques and procedures used by this artist since the beginning of his career througha selection of pieces from the Arranz-Bravo Foundation holdings, drawings from the collectionsof the Museum of L’Hospitalet, portfolios of previously unseen works on paper from the Monteiro Soares collection in Brazil and, finally, contemporary works on paper made by Arranz-Bravo for the occasion. A full symphony of productions on paper that aims to position Arranz-Bravo in the place that, in the view of many art crítics and historians, he deserves as one of the greatest living draftsmen on the contemporary Catalan art scene

The exhibition Arranz-Talo. Los Extremeños’ is an artistic project developed by Eduard Arranz-Bravo (Barcelona, 1942) and Felipe Talo (Barcelona, 1979).

For ten months, Talo and Arranz have worked closely both through the mail and in the study of Arranz-Bravo in Vallvidriera. Paintings, videos, paintings, letters, sculptures, boxes, drawings and everyday objects manipulated are the result of an intense process of ‘artistic cannibalism’. The project seeks to recover, from a contemporary point of view, the spirit of creative partnership lived by Arranz-Bravo during the seventies and eighties, with artists like Rafael Bartolozzi, Jaime Camino, Bigas Luna, Ferran Adrià or Richard Hamilton.

The exhibition is complemented by the publication of a catalog and a critical text written by Sonia Fernández Pan.

A collective exhibition featuring works by Gerard Ballester, Lluc Baños and Natàlia Giné, curated by Aina Mercader From October 1 to December 6, the Arranz-Bravo Foundation in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat presents the collective exhibition Contra Arranz-Bravo.

Combining the qualities of sculpture and installations, the works presented by these three artists explore the space in the broadest and “Perecian” (Georges Perec, 1936-1982) sense of the word, taking as their direct or indirect starting point the work and grammar of Eduard Arranz-Bravo.

The curator invited the young artists to select works by Arranz-Bravo, including drawings from his youth, and paintings and etchings from various periods of his career. In this way, they make Arranz-Bravo’s work their own, presenting new interpretations of them.

Contra Arranz-Bravo occupies the entire exhibition space of the Foundation (the room is usually divided between, along the first corridors, temporary exhibitions by emerging artists and, at the rear, the current show by Arranz-Bravo) with works by the four artists involved. In this way, the pieces by Ballester, Baños and Giné come into contact with those by the master in a more or less explicit way. At times, the former reference the latter directly, at others there is more subtle acknowledgement, or Arranz-Bravo’s work is used as the basis for creating and shaping the young artists’ own projects.

Most of the works here are site-specific, that is to say, designed especially for this show, taking inspiration from the forms, colours and recurring themes of Arranz-Bravo.

We say that reality is explained through time and space. However, we discover, with Perec, that space is a reality in itself. Everything happens in space (domestic, everyday exhibition) and everything can end up being reduced into space. In Contra Arranz-Bravo, the three artists are completely free to experience, occupy, explore, investigate and work with space.

In the external space: whether in the courtyard at the Foundation (Ballester brings out of the exhibition room the modules, recreated in wood, that form walls and divide the room) or in the street, Carrer de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Giné is interested in measuring things. For example, she seeks to ascertain the distance between the ground and the highest point in Arranz-Bravo’s Freedom Bridge on La Rambla de Marina, taking the bridge’s height as a reference measurement bringing it, in the shape of a great vertical pole, into the Foundation courtyard).

In the exhibition space: Ballester proposes Moving the Entrance, a large plastic curtain, long before we enter the room. And he adapts to the architecture of the space with his cardboard project Pieces for… (corner, plinth). Moreover, he makes it more difficult to see certain paintings and routes by installing translucent panels.

In the domestic space: Baños shows his video-performance Interaccions, which splits time and space, featuring a series of actions and interactions with everyday objects and found materials. On the opening day, Baños will present the performance live, when it will be recorded and shown on a loop in the exhibition. The artist’s contribution also includes “Senyalètica”, his own sign language, which he uses to describe some of the works by Arranz-Bravo that are on show.

The official opening of Contra Arranz-Bravo will take place at 8 pm on October 1, coinciding with Barcelona Gallery Weekend (October 1-4), which is taking place at several galleries in both the Catalan capital and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

David Lorente (Barcelona, 1989), a student in his final year at the Fine Arts Faculty in Barcelona, was awarded the 2014 Arranz-Bravo Visual Arts Prize in a competition to which more than sixty artists submitted works. The jury praised the force and daring of Lorente’s art, as well as the solid personality that finds expression in his unusual, delirious, hybrid language. Although his work mainly focuses on sculpture, Lorente also experiments with other formats, techniques and practices: digital imagery, photography, video and so on. His is an explosive, eclectic imagery that takes inspiration from reality that has already been reproduced: found objects, images from magazines, found footage, etc. Using all these ingredients, Lorente mixes a “cocktail” of our hypervisual world, distilling it with the deepest critical insight. David Lorente is an engaged artist who seeks to make us think about the emptiness of so many lives lived out in the world of consumer society. Hence the title of the show: “IT”; the commoditisation of a society that is ever more “materialised”, “capitalised”, ever more consumable and, therefore, ready to be eaten up. An edible society, because anything at all can be lowered to the point where it is offered on the consumer society’s global market.

The exhibition was curated by David Martrat, Montse Liz and Mar Esteve, three of Professor Pilar Bonet’s Art Criticism students at the University of Barcelona. This first show curated by three young critics is the result of an agreement established between FAB and the University of Barcelona, accomplishing one of the Foundation’s founding missions: to give young artists and critics their first opportunities in the professional world. The curators strengthened the conceptual thread behind this show, seeking to answer the question as to whether David Lorente’s work goes beyond the material to explore basic features of human identity. The curators ask: “What is hidden beneath the skin of each individual? Is identity an unquestionable truth? Can art simulate new realities, even if this means questioning many of the identifying principles of our reality?” These are some of them questions that the artists suggests through the projects that form this exhibition, which revolves around the concept of “IT”, phonetically very close to the “ID” of identity, always in opposition to the materiality of the object. The curators’ own thoughts are reflected in the texts published in the exhibition catalogue, in which they mention the theories of Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard and so on.

Organised in cooperation with Terrassa Cultural Centre, the Arranz-Bravo Foundation in L’Hospitalet and the Tecla Sala Cultural Centre, the exhibition Arranz-Bravo. Magnus presents a selection of the sixty finest large works produced over the last ten years by the Catalan artist Eduard Arranz-Bravo (Barcelona, 1941). This last decade in his career is marked by the new artistic challenges that Arranz-Bravo has taken on, including that of creating large canvases: triptychs, polyptychs, large painterly squares that reflect the classical symbology of the Barcelonan artist as seen through the prism of his latest revision. Hands, crosses, fragmented human bodies, forms inserted into the fresh, electrical surfaces that characterise Arranz-Bravo’s colour palette. Many of the pieces shown here were painted at his new studio in Vallvidrera, designed by the architect Jordi Garcés and winner of a FAD prize in 2014. This is a fertile, ambitious period that, in part due to the artist’s increasing international projection (in China, the United States and Russia), has received less attention than it deserves in our own country. However, the quality and scope of Arranz-Bravo’s latest projects make this a truly unusual and exceptional exhibition.

Winner of the First Arranz-Bravo Visual Arts Prize, Sergi Mesa (Manresa, 1987) presented his pictorial project Cosmographies at the Foundation. Cosmographies featured
a series of works that combined chromatic brilliance with the aesthetics of the video game and Internet. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and a member of the PictoBarcelona group, Mesa was selected to take part in the 2014 Biennale of Catalan Contemporary Art, was shortlisted for the Art<30 Prize awarded by Sala Parés and also presented a solo exhibition in Àlex Mitrani’s “Projections” series. Parallel to the exhibition, Mesa painted a mural with a length of more than thirty metres at the Charlie Rivel School in L’Hospitalet in cooperation with all the students there. The mural and the exhibition opened on the same day with a festive parade through the streets of La Torrassa neighbourhood.

The result of a project curated by the art critics Irina Mutt and Sandra Martínez, this exhibition forms part of FAB’s “Dissidences” series. In it, emerging artists and
curators just out of university (in this case, the University of Barcelona) are brought together to work on a completely new exhibition project. In Vanishing Point, Musach, Owens and Ibàñez react to a hostile environment with their art and challenge the structures responsible for the current systemic crisis through actions involving waste material, nature and the human body itself, calling for a return to the essence of life and to critical thinking. The exhibition catalogue was presented in the presence of the art critic Pilar Bonet and several groups of artists who discussed the slogan behind the show: Frictions, Artists, Collectives, Institutions in the Age of Self-Management. The project ended with a finissage Evening Picnic in the courtyard of the Foundation during Museum Night.

In a project curated by Bernat Puigdollers, the young sculptor Laura Ariño (Barcelona, 1991) presented the first solo exhibition in her career. The show served to encourage this artist to produce original, large-scale works that gave a new dimension to her work. The materials used were many and varied: textiles, concrete, alabaster, synthetic materials, wax… Ariño placed these materials at the service of expressing human anguish at the lack of communication around us, as well as such themes as despair, incomprehension, death and the passing of time. Time changes everything, it is metamorphosis. At the official opening, the dancer Laura Calvet performed an experimental dance inspired by the idea of metamorphosis.

The first retrospective exhibition devoted to Eduard Arranz-Bravo’s facet as a sculptor. The show featured some of the most outstanding sculptures that he has made since the seventies, when he began working in this genre thanks to the patronage of the Sala Gaspar gallery in Barcelona. Over the last forty years, Arranz-Bravo has used different techniques and materials (stone, bronze, marble, poor materials…). He has also created several public monuments, such as L’Acollidora [“The Welcomer”] and El Pont de la Llibertat [“The Bridge of Freedom”] in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. The exhibition catalogue fully documents the more than two hundred sculptures that Arranz-Bravo has created over the course of his career.

In a project curated by Marta S. Nacera and Georgina Parrilla, the exhibition Situart featured works by students in different disciplines at the Serra i Abella School of Art and Design in L’Hospitalet. The show was the result of a cooperation agreement between the school and the Foundation. Creation, identity and territory are key themes in the work of the painter Eduard Arranz-Bravo and are also the concepts interpreted and worked on freely by the students, guided by both teachers at the school and the Foundation’s Educational Service.

The Foundation presented its first major group exhibition devoted to the artists resident at the Freixas Factory, one of the most active sites for the production of contemporary art in the city. The residents at this art factory include sculptors like German Consetti and Marcos Romero, the potters that form the La Nave collective, Francesca d’Alfonso, Sophie Thomson, Raúl Hernández and Paola Masi, the Mermeladastudio group of designers (Miguel Ángel Juárez, Laura Blasco and Álex Estévez) and artist-in-residence Quico Estivill. Their works were placed on show at both FAB and the studios at the Freixas building, and on the opening day the two exhibitions were symbolically linked by a parade of the arts led by the percussion group Batubaroa Batucada.

The Joy of the Jump was the title of the project presented by Xavier González Arnau (Terrassa, 1980), a painter who has lived between Berlin and Croatia since 2004. Gonzàlez sees painting as a frontier from which to express the deepest truths of the spirit, and he employs various liberal arts –music, thought, poetry and soon– to connect with and enrich the creative experience. With references to the philosophy of Nietzsche and Reyes Mate and the sacred texts of the Old Testament, Gonzàlez sought in this Joy of the Jump to transmit a sense of hope in a world overexposed to materialism. At the official opening of the show, Gonzàlez created a painting
on a sheet of backlit methacrylate to the beat laid down by DJ Fra, a resident disc jockey at the Sala Apolo club in Barcelona.

In an exhibition curated by the art critic Sílvia Muñoz d’Imbert, the Foundation presented a project developed by three students at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona. Selected from the exhibition Untitled’11 at the university, Ferron, Galdeano and García naturally fused different genres: engraving, drawing, painting, video and photography. All three artists understand art as a medium from which they can give expression to an unstable reality, one of contained rage, closely related to these current times of protest, injustice, disengagement and utopian disenchantment.

The illustration of artists’ books has been one of the favourite artistic pursuits of Eduard Arranz-Bravo (Barcelona, 1941). He has created more than seventy such books over the course of his career, making him one of the most productive Catalan artists in this genre. Using lithography, etching and drawing, Arranz-Bravo has produced artists’ books in cooperation with novelists (Baltasar Porcel, Camilo José Cela, Paco Umbral, George Orwell, Miquel de Palol), poets (Francesc Parcerisas, J. M. Sobrer, Santos Torroella), painters (Joan Ponç, Bartolozzi) and photographers (Xavier Guardans). This exhibition sought to revisit this little-known and surprising facet of his
art, and to showcase the various publications that he has continued to produce up to the present.

FAB paid tribute to the figure of the writer and painter Josep Maria de Sucre (Vila de Gràcia, Barcelona 1886 – Barcelona, 1969) in five projects by two different generations of artists: firstly, Antoni Llena and Arranz-Bravo; and, secondly, emerging artists who had already exhibited work at the Foundation (Miquel Gelabert, Martí Cormand and Diego Tampanelli). Their works established dialogues with ten pastel drawings by De Sucre, all unpublished, from the collections of friends of the artist, such as the painter and goldsmith Jaume Mercadé and Eduard Arranz-Bravo himself. The catalogue published to mark the event featured a prologue by the art historian and critic Àlex Mitrani that brought studies of De Sucre’s life and work up to date.

The Argentinian artist German Consetti (Río Cuarto, 1975) arrived in Catalonia in the middle of the last decade in pursuit of the dream of becoming a sculptor and following in the footsteps of his great reference: Julio González. For several years now, he has lived and worked in the Freixas building in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, alongside other prominent artists such as Miquel Aparici and the La Nave collective. In his show at the Foundation, entitled The Memory of Sculpture, Consetti demonstrated an expressive and spatial interpretation of sculpture, creating huge skulls, torsos, carts and boats, welding metal and cutting wood in the manner of the great early expressionists.

The painting of Albert Arribas (Blanes, 1981) fuses explosions of colour and light and intense brushstrokes with clearly expressionist influences. Having completed
his artistic training at the Fine Arts Faculty in Barcelona and the Massana School, Arribas began to give exhibitions at leading art centres and galleries in our country. The
paintings presented in the Foundation, made expressly for it in 2011, are a veritable explosion of colour and light and, at the same time, a demonstration of painterly courage. In these large works, Arribas shows that he is a virtuoso in the art of combining bright colours with expressive brushstrokes, a master of gesture.

Parallel to his exhibition at FAB, Jordi Abelló illustrated the book La risa de la hiena [“The Hyena’s Laugh”], a text written by Rafael Argullol in one of the chapters of his essay Visión desde el fondo del mar [“Vision from the Bottom of the Sea”], Acantilado, 2010). Edited by Albert Mercadé and designed by Júlia Polbach, the book explores different nuances of laughter –cynicism, vanity, sarcasm, ambition, etc.– noticed in the faces of both dictators and international politicians in recent history, up to the present. In his study, Argullol displays his vast humanist knowledge, Abelló his thorough understanding of the modern and contemporary portrait. This is a lucid, ironic, angry book that faithfully reflects the current state of disenchantment with the political classes.

Jordi Abelló’s Crime Trilogy project consisted of three series of works on paper that adopt the format of the storyboard (Interiors, Street and Crime). In them, the painter, born in Reus in 1971, explored, in dark, tragic style, the complex existential relationship between humans and their domestic and spatial environment.

This was the first major solo exhibition by Nicolás Ortigosa (Logroño, La Rioja, 1982), an artist trained at the Fine Arts Faculty in Barcelona. In the show, Ortigosa presented a series of large murals made using drawing and painting techniques in an eminently gestural work instilled with enormous aesthetic tenacity.

The exhibition The Enigma of Light featured one of the last installations created by Eduard Arranz-Bravo, in 2011. In a work that brought together painting, sculpture and engraving, the artist created a subtle intervention on one of the central themes in art history: the representation of light and its relationship to form, space and colour.

This exhibition brought together the winning works at the twelve editions of the Honda Prizes, one of the most important painting competitions in Catalonia over the last two decades. The prize, awarded on the basis of an open call to painters in the Spanish art scene, has achieved high levels of participation in all twelve editions, attracting more than 1,650 artists and 2,797 works. Amongst the winners whose works featured in the exhibition were such artists as Jordi Isern, Pep Montoya, Ruth Morán and Jordi Martoranno.

Diego Tampanelli (Sunchales, Santa Fe, Argentina, 1970) has lived and worked in L’Hospitalet since 2004, where he forms part of the TPK-Art i Pensament Contemporani (“TPK-Art and Contemporary Thought”) collective. Tampanelli is a multidisciplinary artist who works interchangeably with the image, painting, video
and performance to meditate on the idea of memory and nostalgia in relation to his homeland. Parallel to the exhibition at the Foundation, the most important in his career so far, a seminar entitled “The Vanishing Image” was given by Gep21, a collective engaged in 21st-century thought and politics.

This exhibition was devoted to the more than fifty self-portraits that Arranz-Bravo has done in the course of his artistic career. Arranz-Bravo has cultivated a deep, obsessive relationship with this genre and has become one of the artists on the Peninsula that have most engaged with the European tradition of the existential self-portrait. Like Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Artaud, Francis Bacon and so on, the Barcelonan artist understands the self-portrait as a means of introspective exploration and, at the same time, as a medium for pursuing some of his main aesthetic concerns, such as the intensity of the gaze, organic expressiveness and chromatic effusion.

Hospitalart was a project curated by the art critic Luis Casado to present the work of five young artists linked to L’Hospitalet de Llobregat: Diego Tampanelli, Lusesita, Hanamaro Chaqui, Sergio Mora and Ismael Florenciano. In this initiative, the Foundation engaged with the values of hospitality and welcome that have historically characterised the city of L’Hospitalet.

Martí Cormand (Barcelona, 1970) invents a hidden, abstract world that becomes visible in its representation. This world infiltrates the realistic version of the world, causing it to disintegrate. Cormand’s work is imbued with the qualities of transparency, density, light, shadows and extreme precision, in the manner of the Dutch School. These qualities are fused with references to digital technologies for image reproduction. Here, then, the artist creates a world where the artificial infiltrates the natural.

Trained at Barcelona School of Arts, Miquel Gelabert (Blanes, 1979) is one of the emerging Catalan painters who have best managed to grasp the transition to contemporary landscape painting. In his work, Gelabert recovers and renews attitudes that are affected by a deep crisis: the domain of technique; the praise of transcendence, poetry, magic, mystery; and, finally, the vindication of a tradition of modern art that falls somewhere between abstraction and poetic landscape painting.